


The Time Lord Victorious

by orelseatlastsheunderstoodit



Series: My Doctor Meta [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2019-07-05 15:33:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit/pseuds/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit





	The Time Lord Victorious

Y’know, thinking back on it, the only time I can remember the Doctor actually calling some humans  _unimportant_  is at the end of "The Waters of Mars".

Yes, Nine has his moments of calling us stupid apes, Eleven doesn’t tell his plans to any of his friends (nor really to anyone), and Twelve (in the midst of danger and battle) seems to callously dismiss those who’ve died (while actually holding their names close to his hearts). But they have their moments where they speak to humanity’s importance (’streetcorner, 2 in the morning, getting a taxi home,’ ‘900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before,’ ‘Those people down there. They’re never small to me. Don’t make assumptions about how far I will go to protect them, because I’ve already come a very long way.‘).

But Ten spent  ** _most_**  of his time calling humans amazing and fantastic and brilliant, gazing in wonder at some new invention or a creature he’d never encountered before. How many times did he exclaim that something was beautiful?

So it’s a testament to how far Ten falls when he dons the persona of Time Lord Victorious, that he (in a moment of safety, of what he’s claiming to be victory) calls two members of Bowie Base One  _little people_ , implying that they’re  _unimportant_ in juxtaposition with Adelaide’s importance, simply because their deaths could be safely rewritten (much like that family on Pompeii, or that family who meant to embark on the Titanic). He gleefully gloats that he has changed a fixed point.

It’s so very un-Doctorly of him, and Adelaide calls him on it:

> DOCTOR: Nah! Captain Adelaide can inspire her face to face. Different details, but the story’s the same.   
>  ADELAIDE: You can’t know that. And if my family changes, the whole of history could change. The future of the human race. No-one should have that much power.   
>  DOCTOR: Tough.   
>  ADELAIDE: You should have left us there.   
>  DOCTOR: Adelaide, I’ve done this sort of thing before. In small ways, saved some little people, but never someone as important as you. Oh, I’m good.   
>  ADELAIDE: Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they’re so unimportant? You?   
>  DOCTOR: For a long time now, I thought I was just a survivor, but I’m not. I’m the winner. That’s who I am. The Time Lord Victorious.   
>  ADELAIDE: And there’s no one to stop you.   
>  DOCTOR: No.   
>  ADELAIDE: This is wrong, Doctor. I don’t care who you are. The Time Lord Victorious is wrong.  _([link](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chakoteya.net%2FDoctorWho%2F30-16.htm&t=NTIxNGQ2MjViOTU5ZmJiNjljYTNiOWVkYzU2MTYwNWJmY2M2ODQ5YyxmUVlRUDhmTQ%3D%3D&b=t%3A6tOCh6Sn38LfuqvcyD6tPA&p=http%3A%2F%2Forelseatlastsheunderstoodit.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F126859598280%2Fthe-time-lord-victorious&m=0))_

**But why does Ten act like this?**  Right or wrong (and it’s decidedly wrong, the episode does _not_ cast his actions as heroic), what’s driving this decision?

 **First, the Doctor has been traveling alone since “Journey’s End,” where he left Rose and TenToo on a beach in a parallel universe and left Donna back where she mentally started.** It’s been pretty well established that the Doctor  _should not travel alone_. The stress and losses of the life he leads plus the loneliness of being, well, alone add up. It’s not good for anyone, but the loneliness’ effect is amplified when it comes to the Doctor. 

On a larger level, he sees himself as alone in the universe. He’s bereft of his home, his people, and everything he’d known in his Before life. (And yes, he was a renegade and a rebel, but what can you run away from if it’s not there to run away from?) There’s no one who can understand him as well as he wishes to be understood–-the only person he knew of who could do that died of a gunshot wound. And his companions try to understand him (and do understand him in different ways, but it’s not the same), but he chooses them because they’re enamored and awed by the scope of the universe instead of being crushed and flattened by the weight of it. The loneliness gnaws at him, is always there, lurking in the silences aboard his bigger-on-the-inside ship.

 **Second, he’s tired of loss.**  Remember, this is a Doctor right before he runs off to avoid dying for as long as possible, a Doctor who’s on the verge of saving and forgetting that he saved Gallifrey. So he’s lost his planet, he’s lost Rose, and Martha, and Donna, and everyone else he’s ever met. He speaks to Jackson of the myriad ways he’s lost his “bright and shining companions” in "The Next Doctor", and he turns down Lady Christina’s bid to be a companion in "The Planet of the Dead" with a curt explanation of “[People have travelled with me and I’ve lost them. Lost them all. Never again.](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chakoteya.net%2FDoctorWho%2F30-15.htm&t=MjliOTFhZTk0YTg5MjY1ZWViMTMyMzNmZDlkNGQxM2VlNWJjMmU4NCxmUVlRUDhmTQ%3D%3D&b=t%3A6tOCh6Sn38LfuqvcyD6tPA&p=http%3A%2F%2Forelseatlastsheunderstoodit.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F126859598280%2Fthe-time-lord-victorious&m=0)” 

 **Third, those losses are tied (at least in the Doctor’s mind) to his own actions.** Gallifrey, destroyed by his choice. His friends (his family, Sarah Jane called it), all lost or driven away by the life he leads and the things he’s done.  _It’s his fault_ , and the only option he can see is to not travel with anyone ever again. Ten was a Doctor who was fairly emotionally open about most everything (not about all things to all people, but who ever is?), and each loss must have felt like another nail in a coffin to him. He doesn’t know what else to do, and so he cuts himself off from everything, with dire results. He always tries to create other options but can’t think of any other options for himself.

 **Fourth, even if he didn’t feel guilty about those losses, he still thinks that he causes the ruin of his companions** (which is an idea really delved into with Eleven, but it definitely has its roots with Ten, especially the end of Series 2 onward). Davros accuses him of making his friends (his Children of Time) into weapons, into soldiers, and the Doctor has only to look at Martha, a doctor in her own right, willing to blow up the Earth to defeat Davros, in order to feel the weight of Davros’ accusation. Or he can be reminded that Rose has been working with the Torchwood of her universe and is spending her time popping from one universe to the next, tearing holes in space and time, in order to defeat the Darkness. Or of Jack, the ready-made soldier, who can die again and again. 

He can even be reminded of Jackie, who wasn’t a companion of his, but still affected–going from blithely unaware of the Doctor’s effect on her world to standing up for herself within the Doctor’s world.  _ **The weirdness of his way of life warps those he brings into it, and he sees that as his fault.**_ (Which denies them on some level of their own agency in traveling with him, but that’s a different essay, I think).

The Doctor is wrong to try and make the laws of time obey him, that much is clear. He is not a hero in "The Waters of Mars", and he is not meant to be (nor is he meant to be more than the Doctor normally is, I think, because there’s a scene in "The Runaway Bride" that is framed very similarly to a TLV scene in TWOM). 

But as Ten, the Doctor clearly  _wants_  to be the hero. He wants to be the Man Who Never Would, but he’s the Man Who Has and Thoroughly Regrets It. He’s got a people-saving thing. He wants peace and quiet; he wants a life he’s never been able to have. He’s trying so so so hard that when he fails to save everyone (the Earth was saved but at the cost of Rose, at the cost of Donna, at the cost of Martha), he simply cannot take it anymore. 

Essentially, he’s been pushed to his limit and he lashes out, and there’s no one and nothing to lash out against other than Time itself. He’s like a cornered, wounded animal, biting and snarling at whatever comes near it–on the inside. On the outside, however, he’s going to put a brave face on it, to claim that he’s the winner, that time is not the boss of him. That time can be rewritten, no matter what that woman in the Library said. That terrible things don’t have to happen, if he doesn’t want them too. That everyone can be saved. 

And then Adelaide acts to reassert the fixed point.

And he’s not a hero-–but it’s never been so starkly clear to him before.


End file.
